North Korea - From Juche to Plutocracy?

The current brinkmanship in East Asia - even if it is just diminishing due to special dates in the North Korean calendar - is a signal, how strong and urgent the domestic political struggle is going on: There are influential groups which are fighting for a place at the sun, at the Taedonggang Craft Brewery Bar in Pyongyang or in a VIP room in Macau. There are also informal networks which are helping to get a remittance inside and rocket engines outside - to name only a small part of the business.

In other words: Society is changing - even in North Korea. The intelligence about it still seems to be poor, related to the stuff you can read or hear from Western intelligence agencies. I tried to describe a scenario where the old values of Juche are eroding and the new one change the system - hopefully:

La voie nord-coréenne. Du Djoutché à la ploutocratie?, in: Courtois, Stéphane: Communisme 2013 - 1920-2012. Vietnam, de l'insurrection à la dictature, Paris 2013, pp. 411-420.

The enemy within - Counter-intelligence use by non-state actors

This is the title of a new paper I published in Jane´s Intelligence Review.
For those who want to go deeper:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane%27s_Intelligence_Review

or

http://www.janes.com/products/janes/security/news/intelligence-review.aspx

Short: "Over the course of 2012, police raids were carried out throughout Germany that highlighted the growing problem of non-state actors acquiring sophisticated counter-intelligence (CI) capabilities. Formerly the preserve of the state, counter-intelligence - defined as the totality of measures deployed by an organisation to prevent hostile intelligence collection efforts against it - has increasingly become a tool and a function of a range of illegal groups."

In other words: It´s about the subject I analysed in my dissertation "Private Intelligence. Geheimdienstliche Aktivitäten nicht-staatlicher Akteure", which was published in 2011:

http://www.amazon.com/Private-Intelligence-Geheimdienstliche-nicht-staatlicher-internationale/dp/3531182889/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366789139&sr=8-1&keywords=stephan+blancke

Private (counter) intelligence will be more and more important in the future, when state agencies have to deal with actors, which behaviour is totally unpredictable - like religious cults. There exist amazing and cautionary tales. Beside others main players are powerful Organised Crime organisations with a global attitude. The latter will influence and form governmental intelligence operations in the future - maybe more than terrorist groups.